Sunday, January 31, 2016

Staunton, January 31 – As the number
of Vladimir Putin’s violations of international law and normal morality grows,
ever more people are offering lists of the actions for which he must be held
accountable.Three particularly
interesting examples of that trend have been offered over the last several
days.

Russian journalist Oleg Kashin
offers a list of 11 Putin actions which show just how bad the Kremlin leader is
(svoboda.mobi/a/27518420.html):

·“Putin
is a usurper” who destroyed Russia’s parliament, courts, regional power and so
on.

·“Putin
is an enemy of progress and an enemy of culture,” who has driven society back
toward medievalism promoted “pseudo-Orthodox traditions, caricature-like
puritanism and homophobia,” and opposition to so many features of modernity
including the Internet.

·“Putin
stole May 9,” the only holiday that truly unites all Russians in order to build
his power.

·“Putin
is a man of the past,” who has implemented in Russia everything bad that he and
others like him believed about the West in their youth: militarism, police
rule, the cult of geopolitics, and a belief in conspiracies.

·“Putin
is a revanchist,” who is restoring those parts of the Soviet past that no one
wants back including the nomenklatura, ideological diktat, and a fencing off the
rest of the world.

·“Putin
is a builder of a state that is hostile to its own population,” as shown by
Chechnya.

·“Putin
is the president of unrealized hopes and marching in place.”

·“Putin
is the president of the lie.”

·“Putin
is a cynic” who believes htat everyone can be bought or intimidated.

·Blowing
Up the Apartment Buildings in 1999 to restart the Chechen war.

·Blocking
the resolution of frozen conflicts in Abkhazia and Transdniestria.

·“Unleashing
and conducting aggressive wars of conquest in Georgia and Ukraine,” during
which he ignored international law and agreements.

·Corrupt
and illegal actions while he was in St. Petersburg.

·The
Magnitsky case, for which he bears responsibility for blocking a genuine
investigation if not more.

·Illegal
seize of property and use of the legal system against Yukos and Khordokovsky.

·The
murder of Litvinenko.

·Crimes
against humanity in Syria.

·Laundering
criminally obtained moneys and corruption.

·“The
hero-ization of Stalin (‘an effective manager’), the USSR (‘he who does not
regret the disintegration of the USSR doesn’t have a heart’), and the CPSU (‘Unlike
many former members of the CPSU, I haven’t burned but rather preserved my party
card’).”

·“Ineffective
and unprofessional administration of the Russian economy,” leading to its
current “catastrophic state.”

And finally, a group of Ukrainian
officials have put together a 40-page listing of the crimes the Kremlin leader
has been behind in his invasion of Ukraine. The presentation of the book to the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe has sparked a furor.An online copy is available at dropbox.com/s/5ufpfx9yo4lka9s/Russian-Crimes-WEB-SMALL.pdf?dl=0;

Staunton, January 31 – Western governments
and Moscow continue to press Kyiv to meet the provisions of the Minsk Accords,
but the Russian side continues to violate them and even more to demonstrate in
its demands for change in Ukraine itself why no Ukrainian government could
possibly accept them in their current form, Kyiv analysts say.

Mikhail Samus, the director of Kyiv’s
Center for Research on the Army, Conversion and Disarmament, tells Kseniya
Kirillova for RFE/RL that it should be obvious to all on the basis of Putin’s
January 11 statement that the Kremlin leader’s goal is “not an end of the armed
conflict but rather political changes in Ukraine” (ru.krymr.com/content/article/27520349.html).

If one examines Putin’s statement to
“Bild,” he continues, then it is clear that from Putin’s perspective, “if
constitutional reform will be carried out in Ukraine, then Russia will end the occupation
of Ukrainian territories.”That is “very
interesting logic” from someone who presents himself as a peacemaker.

It shows that “the end of military
actions is not a condition for the realization of the Minsk Accords,” at least
as far as Putin is concerned, Samus says. “First he demands constitutional
reform and political processes and then on the basis of that supposedly will be
created an atmosphere of trust and the completion of all processes including
closing the border.”

That suggests, the Kyiv analyst continues,
that “Russia has all the possibilities to close the border right now and is
using this factor exclusively to blackmail Ukraine.”

And as far as the specific points of
the Minsk Accords are concerned, Russia has not fulfilled any of them.Points 1 and 2 which call for an immediate
ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons hasn’t happened.Point 3 regarding OSCE monitoring has “also
been violated. Points 9 and 10 about withdrawal of forces and weapons haven’t
happened either.

“More than that,” he says, “the
Russian side doesn’t even intend to consider them” because it argues that this can
happen “only after constitutional reform in Ukraine and the carrying out of
elections on the occupied territories.” Meanwhile, Russian forces and
Russian-backed forces continue their activities unrestrained.

“If Russia maintains its present
approach,” the Kyiv analyst says, “Ukraine shoud reject the Minsk Accords and
present at an international level an initiative for the creation of a new form
of resolving the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.”

Given the centrality of Ukrainian
constitutional reforms in Russian thinking, it is important to recognize just
what Moscow wants – and to see that if Kyiv accepted them, it would be
condemning Ukraine to a rickety instability that Moscow could use to prevent it
from achieving stability or pursuing its foreign policy goals.

In a blog post, Kirill Sazonov lists
the three things Moscow and its forces in the Donbas are demanding. First, they
want the Donbas to have a fixed “quota of seats in the Verkhovna Rada,” thus
giving the region a veto not only over actions with regard to itself but over
actions for Ukraine as a whole (blogs.lb.ua/kirill_sazonov/326559_minske_postavili_tochku.html).

Second, they want a total amnesty
for all the militants in the Donbas, something that would allow those people to
continue to function and undermine the Ukrainian state. And third, they want autonomy
for this region so broad that it and not Kyiv could decide on relations with
Russia, have its own independent police and security services, and even border
guards.

“In general,” Sazonov writes, “all
the militants would find work in the siloviki structures over which Kyiv would
not have any influence. All power in the region would be independent of the Center
but would have the possibility of controlling the Verkhovna Rada,” conditions
that would give the Donbas something more than “full independence.”

Moscow and its minions, he
continues, “want full independence plus free access to the territory of Ukraine
plus the right of a veto in the Verkhovna Rada as well as an open corridor for
the Russian army and contraband” given that the siloviki and border guards
would not be subordinate to Kyiv.

“This is more than Chechnya received after its
de facto victory over Russia” as Grozny “doesn’t have a veto in the State Duma.”
Kyiv has rejected these demands; but pressure from Moscow and the West for it to
fulfill the Minsk Accords continues, even though the fulfillment of such
provisions in the Russian understanding would mean the end of the Ukrainian
state.

Staunton, January 31 – The Nogays,
who number just over 100,000 in the Russian Federation, are now at risk of
disappearing as an ethno-cultural group there because of the absence of government
support, a stark contrast with the situation in Turkey where this Turkic people
is being actively supported by Ankara.

Because they do not have an ethnic
territory of their own and because they live dispersed in a number of federal
subjects in the North Caucasus and elsewhere in the Russian Federation, the
Nogays only rarely attract even scholarly attention, let alone examination in
the media.But that may be changing
because of the deteriorating relationship between Russia and Turkey.

And it is not impossible that the
increasing national self-confidence of Nogays in Turkey may lead some of their
co-ethnics within the borders of the Russian Federation to demand that their
linguistic and cultural rights be respected and even to repeat earlier calls
for the formation of a Nogay Republic.

The Nogays, a Muslim Turkic people
who historically developed along the western borderlands of the Golden Horde,
Chablin points out, were incorporated into the Russian Empire during the reign of
Catherine the Great. Before then and indeed until 1860, they governed
themselves via adat and shariat law.

Their historic homeland was known as
the Nogay Steppe, but since their incorporation first in the Russian Empire and
then in the USSR, the Nogays were divided up among several administrative units
rather than given one of their own. As a result, they have had few defenses
against Russian or North Caucasian officials who have refused to support their
language.

Their current problems began in 1944
when Moscow created the Grozny oblast in place of the suppressed Chechen-Ingush
ASSR. Then in 1957, the Soviet government restored that autonomy but continued
to include Nogay territories within it. Other Nogay areas were given to
Stavropol kray and Daghestan.

The authorities in Stavropol kray
and Checheno-Ingushetia “closed Nogay schools and stopped the publication of
newspapers in the Nogay language.” In response, the Nogays repeatedly demanded
the creation of their own autonomous oblast within the USSR and the RSFSR.

The Daghestani authorities adopted
the same approach with the Nogays, but there the situation was made even worse
by the fact that Makhachkala transferred members of other ethnic groups into
the valleys where the Nogays had traditionally lived. Something similar
occurred in Stavropol as well, Chablin says.

He continues: “In 1990, at the third
kurultai, a Nogay Republic was formally proclaimed within the Russian
Federation.” But not surprisingly, it proved stillborn because it was opposed
by the leadership of Daghestan, Checheno-Ingushetia, and Stavropol kray.But if it failed, it clearly has not been
forgotten.

Nogay activists have united in the
Birlik inter-regional movement which has its primary goal the return to the Nogays
of areas which were resettled by Avars and Dargins “within the borders of five
subjects (Astrakhan oblast, Daghestan, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Stavropol kray,
and Chechnya.)”

The success of the movement has been
limited by the extreme dispersal of the Nogays and by the fact that economic
problems in their traditional area of settlement as now so bad that
increasingly young people are moving to the Urals or Siberia to find work.Only in Karachayevo-Cherkessia where another Turkic
group dominates has the situation been slightly better.

Only recently did the Chechen
republic reopen Nogay-language schools, something Stavropol kray officials have
not done. And there is a serious shortage of textbooks and literary works in
Nogay. Where the language is taught, the schools have to use very old textbooks
published in Soviet times; and there are no Nogay dictionaries.

Many nations near extinction
nonetheless have an active group of specialists investigating them, but the
Nogay situation in Russia is different. Few academic specialists are tracking
them, something that stands in sharp contrast to the situation in Turkey where
at least this people’s language and history are being investigated and
reported.

Indeed, what is happening with the
Nogays in Turkey may play an important role in their future inside the Russian
Federation. On the one hand, they are likely to look to Turkey as a model; but
on the other, Moscow is likely to view such glances as a threat and do even
less for them than it has in the past.